maybe I love all those stories of dead things and elder gods and long thin knives in overcoats and the snarl of fangs and portals opening up into some dreadful other realm because it helps me to avoid the truth of fear, the ultimate horror that love is not enough.

I have loved, deeply and truly, and been loved in return, but the hard work of living, the many betrayals of time and of the body, these little cuts the world makes, the thorns we grow from within, the many ways we self-destruct and the ways we fail to disarm or to heal or to understand ourselves or anyone else, on some harsh scale all this stacking meets love’s weight.

We are, each one of us, small and sloppy collections of mistakes and scar tissue and our attempts at happiness, our attempts at kindness. I’m a cracked shell. I’m a dead bird dried flat in a tupperware.I am an idiot. But not the way I was five, six, seven years ago. Things change. We learn. We find new ways to tear ourselves apart. New ways to find ourselves reflected as monsters in a lover’s wet lips. New ways to fail each other despite love.

committed to loving a strangerwho ever remains resident in some foreign country I cannot accesswhere his body sways two feet from mine

my stare grows small limbs to clamber over the back of his neckmy heart streaking wet thuds across a pockmarked tablestraining to nestle between head and shouldera sloppy gargoyle of devotion, all full of dark blood

until he notices and moves awayreplaced by little bits of leaves, cigarette buttssticking like straw to open ended woundswatching from behind as he walks offI look at his face and suddenly realize–we are older than we were when this began.

(heads up: contains stuff about health and bodies and dysphoria and stuff)

This week I was told I have PCOS (polycystic ovary syndrome), and because I am the type of person I am, I have spent much of the last two days doing research. Trying to understand what is going on in my body, and trying to figure out which of my multiple chronic health issues might be tied in with pcos. For those unfamiliar and now worried: it’s not something life-threatening, and it’s actually extremely common. There is no cure but it’s manageable, although my odds of developing some other, more dangerous things, like diabetes, are now higher than normal.

This is scary, but also a relief; a known problem can be addressed in ways that a nebulous feeling of something being wrong cannot. Maybe dealing with this health issue will clear up some others. I feel sort of hopeful and excited in addition to worried and overwhelmed.

The thing about this diagnosis that is somewhat taking me by surprise is the dysphoria of it. So much of the information about PCOS is focused on concerns about fertility, conception, pregnancy, childbirth, passing on genes. The issue itself is often framed as “too much testosterone”, “excessive body hair”, “masculinization of the body”. (From what I understand, this could *also* be framed as “too much estrogen”, because if I’m not mistaken PCOS causes high levels of both testosterone and estrogen and low progestin, but also I’m not a scientist.)

As a genderqueer person with ovaries in my body, I am not loving spending this much time thinking vividly about those ovaries, and–the bigger problem–the expectations and attitudes put upon my body.

So here are just a few things I want to think through in type, mostly for myself.

Not everyone with a uterus wants to bear children. (Many do, and I absolutely wish them health and happiness in that endeavor! But this shouldn’t be your default assumption about strangers.)

Not everyone with ovaries is a woman, and some women do not have ovaries. Gender is not determined by genitals, or hormones, or secondary sex characteristics, or even by deliberate decisions you may make about genitals and hormones and secondary sex characteristics.

A hormonal imbalance is something to be addressed due to the stresses it puts on the body and the potential hazards of underlying problems with the body’s systems that may be causing that imbalance–not because it’s inherently “bad” for a female body to be “masculinized”.

I am still myself regardless of how much hair I do or do not have on my legs, or how I feel about my body, or how my moods may fluctuate. I am still myself regardless of whether symptoms I have been dealing with for a long time get better, or worse, or stay the same, or change. I am always myself, regardless of how I feel about my gender. I am always myself, regardless of any and all diagnoses I have received or will receive. I hope to heal my body, and to learn that body’s needs and serve them as best I can, with love and without judgement.

back in my mother’s house, shifting through long-abandoned stacks of paper from my foolish youth:

I regard my intellect with a rotten eye. Blood on your hands like a bedroom stain. A new hyphenated love of comparative emotion. A new unbinding of a tangled rope. An immense detachment convulsed and split to give you entrance. Give hope to your butterflies and let them consume me. I am amazed at my kindness and at my cruelty. I am chipped, I am scratched, I am unbalanced. I have remarkable potential for failure. You have a remarkable capacity for pain. We’re no two of a kind; I’d have slit your throat by now. I don’t know the space between tolerance and cowardice. Indecisive, I tear myself to bits. I don’t need to make a choice but I need to know what I want. Disjointed, yes. A plane flies overhead. Fidelity is nothing in the face of desire. We will see where my desires lie. You will contain all my irrelevant secrets. Sending desperate messages over temperate climes. Encompassing a world in a few cluttered lines.

confession: whenever I am taking up space in a space made officially queernot just in practice but in title, in queers onlyI am seized by the panicked certainty that I’m not queer enough to be therein any of the relevant ways

because I don’t feel like a woman but I sometimes feel like a femmeor like a permanent dragor like a circus clown

and so people look at me and see long hair and lipstickand the stubble on my partner’s cheeks the broad shoulders on his tall framethey recall the man before thatthey forget the one before

they do not hear my thoughtsthey do not know that no woman I have ever fucked or lovedhas deigned to date meto make me hersdespite my best efforts

they do not know that when I picture my bodyit is exactly the same except not defined by illness, or by anyone elseand maybe I have absand my hair is ten inches longerand my dick six

and I say I changed my name to be more easily googledand I guess that’s truebut as time goes on it gets less so

and as I get older I get less butch but more masculinewhatever that meanslike I want to put on a skirt and interrupt you in a meetingI don’t know

I am feeling not only a little adriftbut like my writing is truly suffering from being this directlike I’m embarrassed, like it’s crasslike I don’t have the right to get up and say hello my name is Sid Branca and I’m genderqueerand you can use they and their when you talk about mebecause you and I and anyone with eyes most days we all know I’m femme as fuck

and while we say presentation and identity are not the sameif you’ve been around for a minute you may have noticed that if you were born with a vagina and you like to wear dresses and kiss boysit doesn’t matter how much hair you grow out or how many girls or how many more complicated constructions you are kissingor how many more complicated constructions you build yourself into and destroy and build againyou will be seen over and over again as straight and as a woman

even if in your mind you’re not even humanbut more like something that fell like a meteor in a fieldor crawled out of a tree, all sticky with sap

I picture myself a thing made out of mud and whispered overbits of sapling trees and string or the workings of igneous rockor a robot built out of spare parts in a desolate futurewhere we don’t have time to give a shit about gender because we are busy scouring the desert for water

or I come from an alien planet where all sex is telepathicand genitals are things that morph with thoughtand not a fixed item to be compared with your fashion senseto determine which diversity grants you can apply foror who yells at you in the streetbut when I look to the oracle of the internetto show me a reflection of myselfto see what I should call meI google genderqueer and I do not see an ocean the size of a bodyor a person carved from wood and given life through sheer will

I scroll through masculine people, whatever that means,who have vaginas and short haircuts like I used to and I see beards paired with lipstickand truly they are all so beautiful and handsome and good

but I’m not genderqueer enough to be herebecause the bodies that I see the most of myself in are those of certain trans women which is surely some kind of offensesome kind of thing I should not saywhen you consider that when I was born they said it’s a girl

even though in my fantasies they say dear god what is that thingit must have come from the crash siteor they say, look what I made at school todayor they gasp quietly into the laptop nightbecause finally, after all these years,they found the extremely specific porn they were looking forand they wept

Someone is taking a long thin needle and piercing the skin just behind your left ear. They push it through slowly until they reach the sinuses, the eyes.

Someone has given you eyedrops of hydrochloric acid.

Someone has taken two small vices and gripped them to the throbbing tendons at the back of your neck.

Someone has made a mortar and pestle out of you, someone is slowly grinding stone against your temples until you are made of powder, a fine flour that will cake with weeping.

A single candle strikes the whole house blind. A whispered word an agony. Two floors down you can tell someone has a television set switched on. The sound is off but you can hear it, the high-pitched whine of a cathode ray tube obsolescing in someone’s living room. The filaments of every light bulb are screaming at you, ready to burst. The refrigerator that keeps your ice packs cold is a dull roar you can not satiate or escape.

Sitting in English class scraping plastic forks and safety pins and the crescent moons of your fingernails across your body just to stay awake. The doctor’s note that said nobody knew what was wrong with you but that you had a tendency to faint and when everybody else got mono from smoking Rob Percarro’s weed they got better and you didn’t. You slept for most of two years. You were so tired. You are still so tired.

And then in college they tell you your blood doesn’t work, that it’s cute and small and broken just like everything about you but don’t worry, it’s an asymptomatic form of the disease, I don’t care what all those people on the internet say, you’ve got bad blood with no symptoms, you’ve got bad blood but it doesn’t matter.

and then later your baby brother loses his mind and swings his fists at the air in the hallway full of lockers where you used to take caffeine pills to keep from falling down and they tell you that you’re almost ten times more likely than everybody else to develop schizophrenia and any children you might have would be five times and that’s if the thalassemia doesn’t get them but don’t worry you have bad blood but it doesn’t matter.

but you wonder if that’s not why someone sticks a needle into your skull or grinds away at your temples and disappears days into pain and exhaustion and terror and you wonder how to turn this all around into something good, or at least something of use.

Justin O. Schmidt is an entomologist at the Center for Insect Science in Arizona. Since the 1980s, he has been getting himself stung by bees, wasps, and ants, on purpose, so that someone with the proper scientific training can write down what happens when you get stung by bees, wasps, and ants. The Schmidt Sting Pain Index is something you can look to when you want to know what a human can survive. The sting of a Tarantula Hawk wasp is completely agonizing, overwhelming, utterly devastating in the moment, but thanks to Justin we know it only lasts for five minutes. The bullet ant sting is almost as painful, but lasts for hours. He describes it as “pure, intense, brilliant pain. Like walking over flaming charcoal with a 3-inch nail in your heel.” For five hours.

But now we know. And if we find ourselves stung by a bullet ant, we know we can make it. I’ve endured five hours of intense pain dozens and dozens of times. And I know I can make it. And I can write about it, I can say to someone else who might be afraid hey, look, you may be a fucking mess and so am I, and having this human body is so strange and dangerous and confusing and painful but you can take more than you know.

We are all so much weaker and so much stronger than we think we are. Pain is both frequent and surprising and somehow not the end of us. And so we describe the stings, to let the others know.

so right now I’m sort of in this place of crisis, of why write about my stupid feelings in the face of so much real shit, like how– or honestly why?—would I give you a poem about how I feel neglected by my father and so I have weird sex about it or about how I once had a dream about my crush standing next to a pickup truck in the rain and it fucked me up for five years? or how I have taken the fact that I am shitty at being an older sister and internalized it as a metaphor about how I’m sort of generally an assholehow can I keep on doing this when it feels like the actual fucking apocalypse is coming?

when climate change might actually kill me and everyone else before my anxiety about old age really kicks in? when a dude who straight-up wants to treat cute lil sexual deviants like me with electroshock therapy like we’re in the fucking Bell Jar is going to be the Vice President of this country I’m in love with? when so many things feel like they’re gonna get worse before they get better, and climate change might actually kill us all before we get to the better? why write poems?

so I was thinking about this, and for some reason I kept thinking about all of the times I dabbled in being a dominatrix. I’ll come back around to that in a minute.

whether or not I think of myself as like, a human woman changes on pretty much a daily basis, most of the time I feel like some kind of genderless space alien who crash landed into a high school production of a second-rate musical and then just kind of… went along with the whole being a human thing because, you know, when in Rome.

but I like wearing bold lipstick and showing too much side boob and devouring the hearts of men and getting spanked and calling people daddy and getting bought presents and literally punching men in the dick when they’re cool with it and wearing nipple clamps while sitting in a dark theater and making plans to help someone put their girlfriend through the stations of the cross

and probably in my heart of hearts i’m a bratty teenage girl with a big dick whose primary interest is making people nervousespecially menAnd I think about the man who paid me to go to a hotel by the airportAnd get sent to the principal’s office with a teacher’s note(did I mention yet that I am a teacher?)and spanked with a hairbrush against the hotel mirror

And I think about the man who paid me to piss in his wine glassIn the bathroom of a fancy downtown restaurantAnd I think about how they thought they were in chargeThat their money made them the ones in control

And I think about the men who yell at me in the streetWho think their voices make them the ones in controlOr their fast cars Or the way they get away with it

And I think about Lolita, our little lady of dolorous hazeHow, spoiler alert, in the book, She dies in childbirthBecause every old man narrator knows that being a woman kills characterThat a femme with agency blooms too big for the page and will outweigh a novelAnd I think about how everyone seems to thinkThat the dirty old man is the protagonist Even though the girl is the one who changes

And I think about how we scare the shit out of youAll us dirty little girlsAnd it doesn’t matter who is holding the paddleWe are powerful because you are afraid, you are awed

You are a new father staring at a mysteryYou are a new lover frightened by the breadth of your desiresThe future is femme, and she wants to meet you in the woods Behind the high school, but that doesn’t mean you know what to do with her

If you really want to do it for meYou’re gonna need more than three hundred dollars and a sense of entitlementI want to watch you reach up inside yourself and find what you’re afraid of and make out with ituntil you feel whole

notebook scraps (perhaps some of these made it into this tumblr when they were first written but whatever, I’m recycling a lot of paper tonight)

*******cw violence and sexual harassment*************

the internet squeezes out cats into your living room

all my words are stolenthe language of a scavengerfeels good in my mouth

all these shapes force themselves through my body, glowing scripts in some reaching– I send long thick lines from my teeth through the air to you, all my languages the tongues of want, a bringing in of–

my body and my words are inextricable from each other, these oceans of language that pour out of me into a dozen glowing boxes, they are all made up of my blood

the wind that is the god

the word, any and each, is never separate from the world

Having a casual one-woman wine and cheese party alone in an ugly basement, trying to keep the sickly-sweet smell of panic from my voice. Suddenly recalling that New Year’s Eve years ago when with those 4am drugs and a little white dog playing on the floor my friend got a call from the stranger who kept calling her and masturbating and saying awful shit in broken english and I took her phone and I told him exactly what I would do to him, how I would find him, where he lived, find his bedroom and go there and put my hands on him, with my bare hands I would rip his cock off his body, I would tear the foul thing right off and he would scream and scream and scream in pain and I would barely hear him over the roar of rage pouring out of my mouth like the blood poured out of his stupid body. I hated him so much in that moment I could hardly see, I only half-remember the sound of his voice but I think he really sounded scared or maybe surprised or maybe it’s wishful thinking but I think he apologized before he hung up. It was weeks before he called her again, something I only knew about later, when it had finally stopped, maybe he found someone else to bother, she was pretty sure it was someone who used to work at her old job, phone numbers on the work schedule contact sheet, and how someone clears dishes doesn’t necessarily tell you how they’ll treat a woman when they think they’re anonymous and god I love technology but every time I read a glow screen sentence about punitive–I feel so incredibly violent that I question a couple of things about myself.

I want you I want you I want you I want you I want you I want you

so easy to make the slip–so easy to make the slip–I want you–some foolish mistake, some words slurred by the haze of lusting, I would happily look into those deep wet eyes for all the time allotted me, you make me want to care for all those things so long neglected.

where the world stops and the person begins. being in a group, “I would not do a violence to any of you, because it would be doing a violence to myself.”

the hegemony of Cartesian dualism– but then is any attempt to supplant it with any other all-encompassing, universally applied theory on how people and bodies relate going to be equally hegemonic?

if you sound bored by the act of speaking, the act of listening will likely be boring too.